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Free PCL viewer? 1
- Thread starter DrPhobos
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1
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I've never seen a free PCL viewer, and I suspect that there aren't any. It is a very complex undertaking.
I have tried three or four different commercial offerings, and they ALL have their shortcomings. Consider that you may be reducing a 600 dpi printing grid down to 96 dpi or so on a monitor.
I am often hired to write printer overlay macros by hand of a business form or what have you. Most of the time this will include HP-GL/2 code. Sometimes the viewer doesn't handle HP-GL/2 code at all or doesn't support some commands.
Fonts can be a huge issue. If you try to utilize the printer's internal fonts to avoid downloading, then the viewer has to have knowledge of the printer fonts.
Of the ones I have tried, a program called Swiftview has been the most successful for my purposes. There is a free demo at The primary application at the time involved PCL files of highly formatted text with some HP-GL/2. This amounted to over 3000 PCL codes per page. The display from swiftview is virtually perfect.
Another one ESCAPEE from England(a company called Red Titan)
Yet another from Pagetech. It doesn't support HP-GL/2 at all so I dismissed it immediately.
Depending on the complexity of your PCL file, one or all of these may prove to be satisfactory. Jim Asman
jlasman@telus.net
I have tried three or four different commercial offerings, and they ALL have their shortcomings. Consider that you may be reducing a 600 dpi printing grid down to 96 dpi or so on a monitor.
I am often hired to write printer overlay macros by hand of a business form or what have you. Most of the time this will include HP-GL/2 code. Sometimes the viewer doesn't handle HP-GL/2 code at all or doesn't support some commands.
Fonts can be a huge issue. If you try to utilize the printer's internal fonts to avoid downloading, then the viewer has to have knowledge of the printer fonts.
Of the ones I have tried, a program called Swiftview has been the most successful for my purposes. There is a free demo at The primary application at the time involved PCL files of highly formatted text with some HP-GL/2. This amounted to over 3000 PCL codes per page. The display from swiftview is virtually perfect.
Another one ESCAPEE from England(a company called Red Titan)
Yet another from Pagetech. It doesn't support HP-GL/2 at all so I dismissed it immediately.
Depending on the complexity of your PCL file, one or all of these may prove to be satisfactory. Jim Asman
jlasman@telus.net
Dr Phobos, If it's for development and not for the end user
I still use lasertwin. Even though it's DOS, it runs fine on my win98 and sure beats having to use all that paper to print it out. It was designed for HP LJ3 but does have a number of font "cartridges" you can "install" to cover most font situations.
I think metro software has gone out of business (the writers)
oasys@sbcglobal.net
I still use lasertwin. Even though it's DOS, it runs fine on my win98 and sure beats having to use all that paper to print it out. It was designed for HP LJ3 but does have a number of font "cartridges" you can "install" to cover most font situations.
I think metro software has gone out of business (the writers)
oasys@sbcglobal.net
I use Columbus ( It views all the CAD formats I need, plot files (HPGL/2) and Office formats as well. Works well for me.
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